Getting to "Know Thyself"

May 16, 2017

Most frequently attributed to Socrates in several of Plato’s works, the expression “Know Thyself” is heard today as an encouragement to get in touch with and clarify your core values, wants and desires. When you hear it, you can almost see the liberal arts college Valedictorian speak: “go forth, young graduates, with the self-knowledge that our college has [hopefully] helped you acquire!” Yet you may wonder what this means. What courses taught it? What experiences inculcated it? If you can tear yourself away from social media for one moment, let’s ask what self-knowledge looks like.

Let’s start with the brain. Our thoughts and actions are always preceded by a deep emotional reaction. Socrates encouraged his companions to investigate their thoughts and would sometimes identify the reactive emotions that gave rise to them. If you can work to become less reactive to your emotional triggers, you can make more considered responses. Today, the awareness of our emotional experience is even more central to what we consider self-awareness.  Each age interprets the Oracle’s enigmatic “know thyself” with a new answer that speaks to the zeitgeist.

Socrates was concerned with the content of thought, using dialectical reasoning to encourage and cajole his companions to reason more clearly. It took until the early 20th century before Sigmund Freud came to revolutionize the way we think about the mind by proposing the existence of the unconscious.  He worked to free his patients from repressed emotional memories through the talking cure. Since Freud, what we know about emotions has grown to include knowledge about how the brain and its structures work, which has changed the way we think about emotion and the language we use to describe it.

We now know that intensely painful emotional experiences are processed very differently in the brain than other kinds of memories. A brain structure called the amygdala is involved in storing these emotional experiences. Such memories cannot be easily recalled by the conscious mind but are cued by association and are often experienced as fragmentary and surprising. We often react out of fear without knowing why we are reacting that way. Memories of this type run the gamut from repetitive childhood experiences of inadequate care, to the pain of rejection in an adult relationships, while at the far end of the spectrum lie deeply traumatic experiences of war and rape that we think of as giving rise to the flashbacks and vigilance of PTSD. While PTSD is the most recognizable form of trauma, we have all experienced to some extent what is called “relational trauma” or “developmental trauma,” and we can all get triggered in unexpected ways.

To increase self-awareness is then in part to become more aware of your knee-jerk emotional reactions. It takes a moment of reflection, to be curious about what just happened, to question a reaction or decision you made.  Being mindful of the content of your mind, watching your stream of thought, develops the muscle of self-awareness. This doesn’t necessarily require meditation, but it does involve curiosity and persistence. Mindfulness is a stance of curiosity, which raises awareness about the flow of thoughts and feelings in the mind. If you do it enough you will see recurrent patterns emerge. In the West, mindful meditation often seems to be practiced in solitude, though there are certainly many mindfulness groups that are led by an experienced guide. This guide can encourage the disciple and build confidence in their unrealized potential. Psychotherapy can offer a deeper experience of being known, a tool that can help the mind to express itself and become more self-aware in the presence of another.

Being able to place trust in a guide is a basic requirement of the pursuit of self-knowledge. Getting there can be difficult for people who have not had good experiences in relationships, so it often requires you to hold some emotional tension while you’re doing it. And like everyone else people, therapists are fallible and sometimes get it wrong, and sometimes have reactions of their own that come up in the course of therapy. The good news is that usually we can sense when what someone is telling us doesn’t fit, and if you’re with a good enough therapist, they can also notice their own reactions and acknowledge them, so that their stuff doesn’t get in the way and you can find your way. With attuned companionship, you can expand your conscious awareness to the level of your implicit, or unconscious, memories. You might be fortunate enough to experience this kind of attunement in another kind of relationship with a different kind of mentor, or with a friend or relative who has developed a high degree of emotional and relational awareness. Yet what makes relational psychotherapy such a powerful resource in the project of self-awareness is the sustained focus on the careful unfolding of the self.

Socrates attributed the phrase “Know Thyself” to an inscription at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi, where people would go to ask the Oracle to offer predictions about their future. I expect the Oracle would offer at best an enigmatic smile to think that to deeply know yourself, you must allow yourself to be deeply known by another. Far from mindless, knee-jerk reactivity, cultivating self-awareness has the potential to allow you to more consciously shape the world you live in.